Summary of JOIE Article by Annette Kendall, University of Missouri-Columbia, U.S. The full article is available on the JOIE website.
Why do some industries sustain a culture of “helping your competitor” even as they grow, formalize, and face sharper rivalry? Standard institutional theory suggests early, informal collaboration gradually gives way to contracts, monitoring, and guarded behavior. Yet in the U.S. artisanal cheese industry, peer-to-peer collaboration has become a taken-for-granted norm, not a relic of the start-up phase.
In this paper, I use a Veblenian Original Institutional Economics (OIE) lens to explain how this happened. I present a four-stage heuristic linking changing forms of uncertainty (radical, relational, coordination, and norm durability) to distinct coordination logics. The central claim is that collaboration among cheesemakers became an informal institution, layered later with formal supports. Efficiency benefits follow but do not explain its origin or persistence.
I treat institutions as habituated patterns of thought and behavior, shaped by meaning, moral commitment, and Veblen’s “instinct of workmanship”. In craft settings where quality and reputation are tightly coupled, this propensity for skilled, honest, and socially valued work aligns identity and moral valuation first with efficiency gains downstream. This contrasts with NIE’s emphasis on incentives, monitoring, and equilibrium outcomes. I argue that OIE is especially powerful for understanding how collaborative norms emerge and become internalized, while NIE has more leverage once those norms are codified into rules, standards, and organizational routines.
To organize this division, I propose a four-stage uncertainty heuristic. Under radical uncertainty, actors lack templates, reliable market signals, or settled standards. The challenge is definitional: what counts as “good work”? Coordination relies on improvisation, imitation, and repetition, with practices validated by “does this seem to work?” rather than formal authority. Under relational uncertainty, the problem shifts to “who shares my standards?” Selective, repeated ties and visible signals of commitment stabilize expectations and begin to draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
As industries grow, coordination uncertainty becomes central: how to maintain alignment without hierarchy across a diffuse peer network. Here, organizations, guilds, standards, and certification schemes appear. NIE-style tools matter, but typically codify and scale patterns already sustained through informal institutions. Finally, norm durability concerns how collaboration persists through generational turnover and shocks. OIE explains endurance via habituation, identity-congruence, and taken-for-grantedness. Collaboration remains “just how things are done,” even as it is channeled through professionalized structures. The heuristic is interpretive rather than strictly chronological (new entrants can face Stage-1 conditions in a field structured by Stage-4 institutions), but it clarifies where OIE and NIE each have greater explanatory force.
From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, early farmstead cheesemakers in the U.S. operated under radical uncertainty. There were no widely accepted standards, limited technical support, and uncertain demand. Many were self-taught, motivated by lifestyle and subsistence. With few formal resources, they relied on informal mutual aid.
In the 1990s, as more producers entered, relational uncertainty became salient. Cheesemakers increasingly looked for moral and reputational compatibility rather than formal contracts. Open-door access to creameries, mentoring, and shared equipment became signals of belonging in a morally loaded community. Organizations like the American Dairy Goat Products Association amplified informal norms of openness and mutual aid, helping to forge an identity-based sense of “who we are.” These practices seeded social capital and drew boundaries between committed insiders and more casual participants.
A crucial feature of this early period is its gendered founder effect. Women in the 1975–99 cohorts occupied more central positions in the network, with higher weighted degree centrality than men. Qualitative accounts show them setting an inclusive, “raising everybody together” tone that emphasized generosity, mentorship, and emotional support rather than zero-sum competition.
By the early 2000s, the field had expanded and regulatory demands had grown. Coordination uncertainty dominated, prompting a proliferation of support organizations: the American Cheese Society, regional guilds, and specialist training programs. Certification schemes and standards emerged. These formal institutions did not generate collaboration but codified and reinforced an ethos already in place. Cheesemakers described an “open-door policy” and a sense that collaboration was not merely tolerated but expected. Formal mechanisms legitimized and stabilized norms anchored in workmanship and mutual recognition.
From 2010 onwards, new entrants encountered collaboration through courses, certification, and institutional channels rather than purely informal mentoring. Survey data show that over 90% of cheesemaker respondents believe knowledge-sharing improves product quality and a large majority see it as integral to their professional identity, even amid rising competition. At the same time, network analyses reveal later entrants formed denser, regionally concentrated clusters embedded in a broader collaborative architecture, consistent with the sedimentation of norms into bounded communities.
The study uses a mixed-methods design: a link-trace network of 536 nodes and 1,326 ties; survey data; 26 semi-structured interviews; and archives. Network metrics and regressions capture structural change across four entry cohorts, while qualitative coding identifies OIE-consistent mechanisms such as habituation, peer affirmation, and moral framing. K-core analysis shows a persistent core-periphery structure: embedded core actors serve as role models, while brokers act as stewards of shared purpose, sustaining the moral infrastructure of collaboration while connecting peripheral members.
Conceptually, the paper repositions social capital as an outcome rather than precondition of collaboration. Trust and dense networks are not exogenous drivers; they are residues of repeated “good work done in good faith.” Collaboration first emerges as an informal institution before being measurable as a stock of social capital or codified in formal rules. This sequencing helps avoid circular claims that “trust causes collaboration,” instead showing how value-laden practice generates recognition, which later crystallizes into trust and makes formal cooperation tractable.The broader implication for institutional economics is that informal, peer-based collaboration among competitors need not be a transient early-stage phenomenon or reducible to hidden contractual logics. In craft-based, peer-organized fields, collaboration can become a durable institutional form rooted in workmanship, identity, and moral commitment. OIE clarifies why such norms arise and persist, and NIE helps explain how codified supports stabilize them at scale.